When the owners of Rose Cottage purchased it a decade ago it had been down at heel for 13 years. It was just the kind of project to showcase the owners’ skills: Grahame Parkes is a furniture restorer and his wife Niamh, is an interior designer who co-owns nearby Straffan Antiques & Design.
Grahame stripped the render off the two-storey Parnellite cottage to reveal its cut-stone façade and the couple set about extending, adding a vaulted, long-house style, single-storey extension to the rear clad in warm red brick.
The livingroom’s original flagstones now floor the porch and reclaimed pitch pine timbers floor the sittingroom and downstairs bedroom.
The stairs to the first floor lead directly from the sittingroom.
Upstairs there are two bedrooms, a single and a double, the main bedroom and the family bathroom.
The showstopper here is to the rear of the original house. Accessed via the sittingroom the open-plan, eat-in kitchen cum livingroom has all the tropes of country living. Overhead is a barn-like tongue and groove panelled pitch roof and reclaimed pitch pine beams, installed by Grahame. There are terracotta tiles underfoot in the kitchen and broad timber boards on the livingroom floor.
The walls feature exposed stone and redbrick and in the kitchen the Aga is set into a snug, arched, redbrick chimneybreast. The pistachio green units have Kilkenny limestone countertops, complete with fossils that the Parkes sourced from Derek Malone Stone Crafts in Clane.
Set on over half an acre of grounds, the garden has also been tamed.
Before the Parkes bought it Rose Cottage had been in the same family for generations and during the second World War had been inhabited by an air raid officer. A symbol denoting this can still be seen engraved on the window to the right of the front door.
The property takes water from a private well and is situated about 3km from Trim. It has a G Ber rating and, measuring 96sq m (1,033sq ft), is asking €340,000 through agent SherryFitzGerald Royal.
Bitten by the restoration bug, the Parkes have bought a larger period home with a view to doing a similarly sympathetic restoration job there
